I don't see it as a big problem. Typically there are 3 kinds of power plants out there:
1. "Baseline" power plants that run at full capacity all the time. Usually the cheapest to run, with a dependable constant output. Typically something like nuclear, hydro, geothermal, sometimes coal. Contrary to popular belief around here, the total capacity from these plants is usually less than the lowest demand.
2. Power plants that vary their output to meet demand. Usually a little more expensive to run, but can vary their output somewhat quickly. During peak times, they will run at near 100%, and during off peak hours will be running at a small capacity. Typically coal, natural gas, but also can include things like biomass. It's not easy to bring the 2nd category of plants on/offline, and likewise they don't want to have them running if they aren't needed (that costs money), so even at the lowest demand these plants are still working to put out power to the grid.
3. Power plants that typically don't run, and are only used in a pinch when power peaks above and beyond what the top two categories can provide. These power plants are usually costly to run, usually dirty, but can start generating very quickly. Typically things like oil, gas-fired, even diesel.
Wind and solar compliment the 2nd category well. These plants are used to varying their capacity, the only change is that they would now have to vary their output as (total demand)-(solar & wind output)-(baseline output) instead of (total demand)-(baseline output) they do now. Solar is particularly nice about this, as the amount of power the solar plants will produce can be predicted with some accuracy, and the ouput of the solar power will correlate with the demand, meaning the 3rd category of plants that cause the most pollution and cost the most to run won't be needed as much. Wind is bit less useful due to it being less predictable and not correlating well with demand, but can still ease some of the load of the 2nd category of plants, especially if you get the turbines in enough areas that you don't have to worry about local weather as much.
I don't know about where you are, but where I am most of the heating is done with natural gas or propane. Sure, you need some electricity to run the fans in a forced air system, but it isn't that much.
As a side note, I'd like to point out that the title is incredibly biased and inaccurate. They imply that by copying a piece of media is illegal. It isn't, only copying the content on it in certain circumstances is illegal. The media is completely interchangeable and optional. It should be "Copy that movie, lose your computer" or something like that. It at least wouldn't be woefully inaccurate.
Is that the one with the glossy screen? Seriously, who thought that was a good idea? It looks good in a dim setting, but in a brightly lit room or outdoors it's nothing but glare. And it's even worse you have people who can't keep their grubby fingers off your screen whenever they are pointing something out to you.
It has nothing to do with the fact that support vorbis in itunes and not on the ipod would simply be confusing to users.
How so?
You might argue that they should support both, sure, go ahead, burn your batteries for no good reason.
The reason why Rockbox burns batteries playing back OGG on the iPod is because it has to decode the file in software. It doesn't have to be that way, the no-name Asian manufacturers have figured it out, surely Apple can too.
They probably fired it up, ran a few tests, and saw no problems so it's OK. I have the same problem with a computer that locks up every 2-4 days. Clearly something is wrong, but naturally the PC appears to be fine on the bench for a couple of hours. Probably should throw the board into the microwave for a few seconds to make sure its dead.
This sort of statement really undermines your credibility. It's untrue; not just false, but so false as to make it clear that anyone believing it cannot be trusted with any statement.
That's an awfully sweeping statement. You know, the type of analysis done in the article is not new. If you take a look at the results in Ohio for 2004, you'll notice the same kind of trends as seen in TFA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ohio_kerry_support_vs_turnout.gif
Though I suppose that carries about as much weight as exit polls do nowadays when it comes to presidential elections in the US.
My experience is that they aren't quite as durable as they used to be, but are still a step above everyone else (excluding the more specialty stuff like the Toughbook, of course). I also like the styling, and a 5 year old Thinkpad looks like a Thinkpad, and won't look dated like silver paint with blue LEDs or white (and yellowed) plastic is going to look in a few years.
Define "irreparably broken". I would say most "bricked" devices I've seen over the years could be fixed easily by someone who has basic soldering skills (obvious problems bad capacitors and cold/bad/broken solder joints are common), and/or had an eeprom burner handy (corrupted/bad firmware). Most of the rest could be repaired by an average electronics tech, as custom parts like ICs rarely go bad - it's usually something else.
A problem with that is this also stops legitimate truck traffic too. You have to figure out how to get rid of the unwanted trucks passing through, while still allowing the trucks that actually need to come into town to do things like make local deliveries.
Well what was the government supposed to do before 9/11 that would have been acceptable to the people who now bleat about the government violating their rights after 9/11 as it attempts to secure airports and travel to prevent further attacks?
Well, you could use your reading comprehension skills and go back and read what this discussion was about, which was what Richard Clarke recommended back in early 2001, things like going into Afganistan and dismantling Al Queda. It had nothing at all to do with security theatre which you brought up. Of course, you can't make everyone happy and I would expect that people would complain about that too, similar to how people complained when Bill Clinton did something similar, but whatever.
Unequivocal. The person in charge of counter-terrorism up to the very date that the Bush administration started CONFIRMED that 9/11 was already irreversibly in motion. The opportunity to stop it had already passed.
Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and now you can make the argument that doing nothing may have been the best thing, if you consider any action at the time to be a waste of time and money.
However, the fact still stands that the Bush Administration was warned, and chose to do nothing at all about it.
The problem is, Ubuntu doesn't support that new, shiny hardware that everyone wants to use and Vista does. Sure, Ubuntu supports that P2-era hardware just fine, and will install and run on that old G3 Powermac, but people don't care about that as much (atleast outside of here).
Interesting. One of the major downsides to using OSX is that there isn't as much software available for it. If OSX were able to run windows executables natively (think Microsoft Office and games) that would be a major coup for Apple.
You might want to ask IBM how that worked out for them years ago.
Comcast is throttling the upload connections, they don't seem to care as much about the downloads. So any well seeded torrent should cruise right along, as you can leech from the seeds. The real question is how long does it take you to seed it back up to 1:1?
Although I've never seen one (I guess it wasn't possible when CDs were introduced, and has never been desired since?), you could certainly now produce a CD that was double-sided, like an LP, with 74 minutes to a side, almost 160 minutes total...not that there'd be much demand for it now, when you can put hours onto a CD with modern compression, perhaps even having it sound better than 44.1/16 PCM.
I'm not entirely sure that is possible. The data layer of a CD is on the opposite side of the clear plastic layer, and the spec says that layer has to be atleast 1.1mm thick. So in order to make a double layer CD with the plastic layer the appropiate thickness, the CD would have to atleast 2.2mm thick, which would be twice as thick as a normal CD. My guess is that a fair number of CD players would have trouble with those, especially slot loading CD players and changers that use a cartridge design. You could try making the clear plastic layer thinner, but that also carries the risk that some CD players wouldn't be able to play the disk either as you're changing the path between the laser and the detector by a fair abount. So cool idea, but I don't think it's going to happen.
I think a better analogy might be that my old 486 can run Linux, but it can't run the latest Ubuntu release.
I'm still a bit confused by all this anyway. I put Vista Ultimate on a laptop that didn't even meet the requirements for Home Basic. Guess what? It worked. Sure, I don't have features like Aero, but it did run.
I find that Windows' error messages don't really mean anything (to me atleast), but you can type them into Google and can generally find specific information about the error I'm having and how to fix it.
Apple's error messages are for the most part, completely worthless.
If I sell you a shrinkwrapped book - no conditions attached - and then print, on the inside of the front cover, a "licence" prohibiting you from, say, reading the book aloud for your kids. Do you reckon you're bound by that "licence" ? At what point did you enter into the agreement ? Does any random text that you're exposed to subject you to the conditions spelled out -- even if you never AGREE to the text ? Can I hold a contract under your nose that says "by reading this, you agree to give me all your money", and thereafter actually collect from you ?>
The reason we have EULAs is because of the way computers work, you have to copy the software. Generally, you have to copy the software from the media to your harddrive, then again from your harddrive to your system memory to run it (in the old days, you can skip over the harddrive step, but the same idea). Since you aren't supposed to copy copyrighted works, the act of simply installing/running the software could be considered a copyright violation. So the software vendor gives you permission to copy the software so you can run it, and uses that excuse to tack on extra conditions, with the threat that if you don't agree to those conditions, they can hit you with a copyright violation if you run it anyway. Obviously, this is a pretty weak stance, but so far EULAs have not been tested in court (to my knowledge), so the threat is still there.
Since you don't have to copy the book to read it, EULAs for books would be a bit of a harder thing to pull off. Though if you read it aloud, they could try to nail you with a public performance or something stupid like that I guess.
Beyond that, I highly recommend that anyone with a Mac buys *at least* an external hard drive and installs OSX on the hard drive. Unlike most operating systems, OSX will install easily onto an external hard drive, and once installed, you can boot any Mac from that hard drive. By that, I can plug a hard drive into my Macbook, hold down the "option" button while booting, and I'll be given the option of booting from the external hard drive. USB or Firewire, no problem. I can then take the same hard drive and do the same thing with an iMac or Mac Pro without worrying about the fact that it's different hardware. I don't have to load alternate drivers or anything.
I don't see how that would work for any Mac. Seems you would have to have two disks for that, one with the PPC version of OSX and another with the Intel version. Or does 10.5 contain everything to boot both kinds (I guess that would explain the 9GB required for the install)?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see it as a big problem. Typically there are 3 kinds of power plants out there:
1. "Baseline" power plants that run at full capacity all the time. Usually the cheapest to run, with a dependable constant output. Typically something like nuclear, hydro, geothermal, sometimes coal. Contrary to popular belief around here, the total capacity from these plants is usually less than the lowest demand.
2. Power plants that vary their output to meet demand. Usually a little more expensive to run, but can vary their output somewhat quickly. During peak times, they will run at near 100%, and during off peak hours will be running at a small capacity. Typically coal, natural gas, but also can include things like biomass. It's not easy to bring the 2nd category of plants on/offline, and likewise they don't want to have them running if they aren't needed (that costs money), so even at the lowest demand these plants are still working to put out power to the grid.
3. Power plants that typically don't run, and are only used in a pinch when power peaks above and beyond what the top two categories can provide. These power plants are usually costly to run, usually dirty, but can start generating very quickly. Typically things like oil, gas-fired, even diesel.
Wind and solar compliment the 2nd category well. These plants are used to varying their capacity, the only change is that they would now have to vary their output as (total demand)-(solar & wind output)-(baseline output) instead of (total demand)-(baseline output) they do now. Solar is particularly nice about this, as the amount of power the solar plants will produce can be predicted with some accuracy, and the ouput of the solar power will correlate with the demand, meaning the 3rd category of plants that cause the most pollution and cost the most to run won't be needed as much. Wind is bit less useful due to it being less predictable and not correlating well with demand, but can still ease some of the load of the 2nd category of plants, especially if you get the turbines in enough areas that you don't have to worry about local weather as much.
I don't know about where you are, but where I am most of the heating is done with natural gas or propane. Sure, you need some electricity to run the fans in a forced air system, but it isn't that much.
As a side note, I'd like to point out that the title is incredibly biased and inaccurate. They imply that by copying a piece of media is illegal. It isn't, only copying the content on it in certain circumstances is illegal. The media is completely interchangeable and optional. It should be "Copy that movie, lose your computer" or something like that. It at least wouldn't be woefully inaccurate.
And I would like to point out that the title is an obvious reference to an old and hilariously bad anti-piracy video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xfqkdh5Js4
Is that the one with the glossy screen? Seriously, who thought that was a good idea? It looks good in a dim setting, but in a brightly lit room or outdoors it's nothing but glare. And it's even worse you have people who can't keep their grubby fingers off your screen whenever they are pointing something out to you.
It has nothing to do with the fact that support vorbis in itunes and not on the ipod would simply be confusing to users.
How so?
You might argue that they should support both, sure, go ahead, burn your batteries for no good reason.
The reason why Rockbox burns batteries playing back OGG on the iPod is because it has to decode the file in software. It doesn't have to be that way, the no-name Asian manufacturers have figured it out, surely Apple can too.
They probably fired it up, ran a few tests, and saw no problems so it's OK. I have the same problem with a computer that locks up every 2-4 days. Clearly something is wrong, but naturally the PC appears to be fine on the bench for a couple of hours. Probably should throw the board into the microwave for a few seconds to make sure its dead.
This sort of statement really undermines your credibility. It's untrue; not just false, but so false as to make it clear that anyone believing it cannot be trusted with any statement.
That's an awfully sweeping statement. You know, the type of analysis done in the article is not new. If you take a look at the results in Ohio for 2004, you'll notice the same kind of trends as seen in TFA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ohio_kerry_support_vs_turnout.gif
Though I suppose that carries about as much weight as exit polls do nowadays when it comes to presidential elections in the US.
My experience is that they aren't quite as durable as they used to be, but are still a step above everyone else (excluding the more specialty stuff like the Toughbook, of course). I also like the styling, and a 5 year old Thinkpad looks like a Thinkpad, and won't look dated like silver paint with blue LEDs or white (and yellowed) plastic is going to look in a few years.
A brick is a device that is irreparably broken.
Define "irreparably broken". I would say most "bricked" devices I've seen over the years could be fixed easily by someone who has basic soldering skills (obvious problems bad capacitors and cold/bad/broken solder joints are common), and/or had an eeprom burner handy (corrupted/bad firmware). Most of the rest could be repaired by an average electronics tech, as custom parts like ICs rarely go bad - it's usually something else.
Interesting how they divide up IE but clump all the Firefoxes together. What if they broke up Firefox into 1.0/1.5/2.0/3.0 beta?
A problem with that is this also stops legitimate truck traffic too. You have to figure out how to get rid of the unwanted trucks passing through, while still allowing the trucks that actually need to come into town to do things like make local deliveries.
Well what was the government supposed to do before 9/11 that would have been acceptable to the people who now bleat about the government violating their rights after 9/11 as it attempts to secure airports and travel to prevent further attacks?
Well, you could use your reading comprehension skills and go back and read what this discussion was about, which was what Richard Clarke recommended back in early 2001, things like going into Afganistan and dismantling Al Queda. It had nothing at all to do with security theatre which you brought up. Of course, you can't make everyone happy and I would expect that people would complain about that too, similar to how people complained when Bill Clinton did something similar, but whatever.
Unequivocal. The person in charge of counter-terrorism up to the very date that the Bush administration started CONFIRMED that 9/11 was already irreversibly in motion. The opportunity to stop it had already passed.
Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and now you can make the argument that doing nothing may have been the best thing, if you consider any action at the time to be a waste of time and money.
However, the fact still stands that the Bush Administration was warned, and chose to do nothing at all about it.
The problem is, Ubuntu doesn't support that new, shiny hardware that everyone wants to use and Vista does. Sure, Ubuntu supports that P2-era hardware just fine, and will install and run on that old G3 Powermac, but people don't care about that as much (atleast outside of here).
The latest version of Nero is horrible compared to the older versions, why would I want to upgrade?
....and Xerox beat them both!
Interesting. One of the major downsides to using OSX is that there isn't as much software available for it. If OSX were able to run windows executables natively (think Microsoft Office and games) that would be a major coup for Apple.
You might want to ask IBM how that worked out for them years ago.
Someone who posts to Slashdot should know better:
Where exactly did the poster say anything incorrect?
That's a press release on Apple's own website. I suppose you believe everything you read on microsoft.com too?
Comcast is throttling the upload connections, they don't seem to care as much about the downloads. So any well seeded torrent should cruise right along, as you can leech from the seeds. The real question is how long does it take you to seed it back up to 1:1?
Although I've never seen one (I guess it wasn't possible when CDs were introduced, and has never been desired since?), you could certainly now produce a CD that was double-sided, like an LP, with 74 minutes to a side, almost 160 minutes total...not that there'd be much demand for it now, when you can put hours onto a CD with modern compression, perhaps even having it sound better than 44.1/16 PCM.
I'm not entirely sure that is possible. The data layer of a CD is on the opposite side of the clear plastic layer, and the spec says that layer has to be atleast 1.1mm thick. So in order to make a double layer CD with the plastic layer the appropiate thickness, the CD would have to atleast 2.2mm thick, which would be twice as thick as a normal CD. My guess is that a fair number of CD players would have trouble with those, especially slot loading CD players and changers that use a cartridge design. You could try making the clear plastic layer thinner, but that also carries the risk that some CD players wouldn't be able to play the disk either as you're changing the path between the laser and the detector by a fair abount. So cool idea, but I don't think it's going to happen.
I think a better analogy might be that my old 486 can run Linux, but it can't run the latest Ubuntu release.
I'm still a bit confused by all this anyway. I put Vista Ultimate on a laptop that didn't even meet the requirements for Home Basic. Guess what? It worked. Sure, I don't have features like Aero, but it did run.
I find that Windows' error messages don't really mean anything (to me atleast), but you can type them into Google and can generally find specific information about the error I'm having and how to fix it.
Apple's error messages are for the most part, completely worthless.
If I sell you a shrinkwrapped book - no conditions attached - and then print, on the inside of the front cover, a "licence" prohibiting you from, say, reading the book aloud for your kids. Do you reckon you're bound by that "licence" ? At what point did you enter into the agreement ? Does any random text that you're exposed to subject you to the conditions spelled out -- even if you never AGREE to the text ? Can I hold a contract under your nose that says "by reading this, you agree to give me all your money", and thereafter actually collect from you ?>
The reason we have EULAs is because of the way computers work, you have to copy the software. Generally, you have to copy the software from the media to your harddrive, then again from your harddrive to your system memory to run it (in the old days, you can skip over the harddrive step, but the same idea). Since you aren't supposed to copy copyrighted works, the act of simply installing/running the software could be considered a copyright violation. So the software vendor gives you permission to copy the software so you can run it, and uses that excuse to tack on extra conditions, with the threat that if you don't agree to those conditions, they can hit you with a copyright violation if you run it anyway. Obviously, this is a pretty weak stance, but so far EULAs have not been tested in court (to my knowledge), so the threat is still there.
Since you don't have to copy the book to read it, EULAs for books would be a bit of a harder thing to pull off. Though if you read it aloud, they could try to nail you with a public performance or something stupid like that I guess.
Beyond that, I highly recommend that anyone with a Mac buys *at least* an external hard drive and installs OSX on the hard drive. Unlike most operating systems, OSX will install easily onto an external hard drive, and once installed, you can boot any Mac from that hard drive. By that, I can plug a hard drive into my Macbook, hold down the "option" button while booting, and I'll be given the option of booting from the external hard drive. USB or Firewire, no problem. I can then take the same hard drive and do the same thing with an iMac or Mac Pro without worrying about the fact that it's different hardware. I don't have to load alternate drivers or anything.
I don't see how that would work for any Mac. Seems you would have to have two disks for that, one with the PPC version of OSX and another with the Intel version. Or does 10.5 contain everything to boot both kinds (I guess that would explain the 9GB required for the install)?